The science behind Indian food's appeal

Everyone knows that Indian food, with its widely variable and
uniquely spiced recipes, is delicious. The Washington
Post reports that scientists now have a better understanding of
its unique appeal. Researchers at the Indian Institute for
Technology analyzed thousands of recipes
from a popular Indian food website. They looked at how
often the component ingredients of various dishes shared flavor
compounds. After analyzing over 200 ingredients and crunching the
numbers, researchers determined that Indian food was
distinguished from Western cuisines in that few of the flavor
compounds overlap.

The article explains this rather complicated analysis using Venn
diagrams. If you think of the flavor profiles of each
particular ingredient - they use onion and coconut as examples - as
a whole composed of several smaller components, you can
imagine that while the ingredients are different
overall, some of their underlying chemical compounds
may overlap.

The researchers analyzed the flavor profiles for ingredients in
thousands of recipes. What they found was that Indian recipes
tended to include ingredients whose flavors hardly overlap at all.
"We found that average flavor sharing in Indian cuisine was
significantly lesser than expected," the researchers wrote. To put
it another way, the more connection between any two ingredients,
the less likely both will appear in the same Indian recipe. This is
quite different from Western cuisines, which tend to marry flavors
with similar profiles.

If you're interested in learning more about the science, the
article includes illustrations and links to several studies. Also
included is a link to a nifty chart
from Scientific American that shows which foods share the most
flavor compounds with others.